dustrious Ally represented the
nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to suggest the savage
misery of the Mountain farmers.

As she lay there, half-stunned by her tragic initiation, Charity vainly
tried to think herself into the life about her. But she could not even
make out what relationship these people bore to each other, or to her
dead mother; they seemed to be herded together in a sort of passive
promiscuity in which their common misery was the strongest link. She
tried to picture to herself what her life would have been if she had
grown up on the Mountain, running wild in rags, sleeping on the floor
curled up against her mother, like the pale-faced children huddled
against old Mrs. Hyatt, and turning into a fierce bewildered creature
like the girl who had apostrophized her in such strange words. She was
frightened by the secret affinity she had felt with this girl, and by
the light it threw on her own beginnings. Then she remembered what Mr.
Royall had said in telling her story to Lucius Harney: "Yes, there was
a mother; but she was glad to have the child go. She'd have given her to
anybody...."

Well! after all, was her mother so much to blame? Charity, since that
day, had always thought of her as destitute of all human feeling; now
she seemed merely pitiful. What mother would not want to save her child
from such a life? Charity thought of the future of her own child, and
tears welled into her aching eyes, and ran down over her face. If she
had been less exhausted, less burdened with his weight, she would have
sprung up then and there and fled away....

The grim hours of the night dragged themselves slowly by, and at last
the sky paled and dawn threw a cold blue beam into the room. She lay
in her corner staring at the dirty floor, the clothes-line hung with
decaying rags, the old woman huddled against the cold stove, and the
light gradually spreading across the wintry world, and bringing with it
a new day in which she would have to live, to choose, to act, to make
herself a place among these people--or to go back to the life she had
left. A mortal lassitude weighed on her. There were moments when she
felt that all she asked was to go on lying there unnoticed; then her
mind revolted at the thought of becoming one of the miserable herd from
which she sprang, and it seemed as though, to save her child from such
a fate, she would find strength to travel any distance, and bear any
burden life might put